Heather Headley brings Broadway to LR’s Broadway

Whoever decided to put Little Rock’s concert hall at West Markham Street and Broadway must have had the show the Arkansas Symphony put on Saturday evening in mind.

Singer-actress Heather Headley, who originated the role of Nala in The Lion King on Broadway and the title role of Aida (which, by the way, earned her a 2000 Tony Award for best actress in a musical), just tore up the Robinson Center Performance Hall stage, with the orchestra and her own conductor, Ron Colvard, superbly supporting her and a few guests to help make the show really special.

Headley’s broad-spectrum, Broadway-centered program included songs she’d done on the Broadway stage — a glancing blow at Aida and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from The Lion King — and a number of numbers that otherwise fit her incredible voice and inimitable style that she explained she was “trying on,” like dresses, for the evening.

Most of the songs were familiar, including Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” and three from musicals based on The Wizard of Oz (“Over the Rainbow” from the 1939 film, “Home” from The Wiz and, as a closer, “For Good” from Wicked).

Some were less familiar — for example, “Look to the Rainbow” from Finian’s Rainbow. (The movie shows up occasionally on Turner Classic Movies, but I suspect few in the audience could have hummed that one going or coming.)

And some would be familiar maybe only to the staunchest Broadway devotee — “My House” from Tim Minchin’s Matilda, part of a sort of “home” focus that permeated the evening, and “I’m Still Hurting” from Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which Headley gave a very powerful rendition.

The “setlist” was actually almost entirely ballads; the audience got one uptempo number right after intermission: Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High”, with strong backing from the orchestra and the Parkview High School Lab Singers and Madrigals.

Headley gave the singers a chance to shine on their own, with “A Million Dreams” from the movie The Greatest Showman, with their director, Carolyn Foreman, on the podium and two excellent but unidentified soloists in the spotlight. (Headley paid the chorus overt and backhanded compliments, the latter suggesting that she’d be competing with them for work if they made it to New York.)

Also joining Headley on the second half: Chris Mann, a finalist on NBC’s The Voice and a veteran of 700 performances in the title role of The Phantom of the Opera, duetting on David Foster’s “The Prayer” and an amazing rendition of “Amazing Grace”; he got a solo shot at “Music of the Night” from Phantom, without which no ASO Broadway pops program seems to be complete without.

Headley gave the audience a chance to rock out on the first encore, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” from The Bodyguard, a stage version of the 1994 Whitney Houston film that she did for a year in London’s West End, and in “exchange” for an unplanned audience singing of “Happy Birthday,” wrapped up with “I Will Always Love You” from the same show.